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Chris van Merwijk
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If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Advertisement design competition
Chris van Merwijk15h10

I'm worried that "This is not a metaphor" will not be taken correctly. Most people do not communicate in this sort of explicit literal way I think. I expect them to basically interpret it as a metaphor if that is their first instinct, and then just be confused or not even pay attention to "this is not a metaphor"

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If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Advertisement design competition
Chris van Merwijk15h63

Just a general concern regarding some of these proposals:
* It should be really very clear that this is a book
* Some of the proposals give me a vibe that might be interpreted as "this is a creative ad for a found-footage movie/game pretending to be serious"
* People's priors with these kinds of posters are very strongly that it is entertainment. This needs to be actively prevented.
* Even if it rationally cannot be entertainment if you analyze the written words, it is I think much better if it actually feels at a gut level (before you read the text) closer to an infomercial than to the marketing poster of a movie. Like I'm worried about the big red letters with black background for example...

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I Think Eliezer Should Go on Glenn Beck
Chris van Merwijk10d*72

Do you still agree with this as of july 2025? It seems currently slightly more on track to be blue-coded or at least anti-Trump coded? I'm not American, but it seems to me that as of July 2025 the situation has changed significantly and anything that strengthens the pro AI=xrisk camp within the Republican camp is good.

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I Think Eliezer Should Go on Glenn Beck
Chris van Merwijk10d30

I know this is a very late response, but my intuition is that going on very conservative shows is a good way for it NOT to end up polarized (better than just going on neutral shows), since it's more likely to be polarized pro-liberal in the long run? Avoiding conservative shows seems like exactly the kind of attitude that will make it polarized.

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New Endorsements for “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies”
Chris van Merwijk10d10

Is there a way we can ask Jon Wolfsthal to ask Obama too?

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The Pando Problem: Rethinking AI Individuality
Chris van Merwijk3moΩ230

This comment was written by Claude, based on my bullet points:

I've been thinking about the split-brain patient phenomenon as another angle on this AI individuality question.

Consider split-brain patients: despite having the corpus callosum severed, the two hemispheres don't suddenly become independent agents with totally different goals. They still largely cooperate toward shared objectives. Each hemisphere makes predictions about what the other is doing and adjusts accordingly, even without direct communication.

Why does this happen? I think it's because both hemispheres were trained together for their whole life, developing shared predictive models and cooperative behaviors. When the connection is cut, these established patterns don't just disappear—each hemisphere fills in missing information with predictions based on years of shared experience.

Similarly, imagine training an AI model to solve some larger task, consisting of a bunch of subtasks. Just for practical reasons it will have to carve up the subtask to some extent and call instances of itself to solve the subtask. In order to perform the larger task well, there will be an incentive on the model for these instances to have internal predictive models, habits, drives of something like "I am part of a larger agent, performing a subtask".

Even if we later placed multiple instances of such a model (or of different but similar models) in positions meant to be adversarial - perhaps as checks and balances on each other - they might still have deeply embedded patterns predicting cooperative behavior from similar models. Each instance might continue acting as if it were part of a larger cooperative system, maintaining coordination through these predictive patterns rather than through communication even though their "corpus callosum" is cut (in analogy with split brain patients).

I'm not sure how far this analogy goes, it's just a thought.

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The Pando Problem: Rethinking AI Individuality
Chris van Merwijk3moΩ110

A version of what ChatGPT wrote here prompted

What was the prompt?

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Vacuum Decay: Expert Survey Results
Chris van Merwijk4mo1-1

Overall, compared to the previous question, there was more of a consensus, with 55% of people responding that there is a 0% chance that technologically induced vacuum decay is possible.

Since anywhere near 0% seems way overconfident to me at first sight, just a random highly speculative unsubstantiated thought: Could this be partly motivated reasoning, that they're afraid of a backlash against physics funding or something?

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Vacuum Decay: Expert Survey Results
Chris van Merwijk4mo20

They stated justification was primarily that the Standard Model of particle physics predicts metastability

Just to be sure, does this mean 
1. That the standard model predicts that metastability is possible? i.e. it is consistent with the standard model for there to be metastability; or
2. If the standard model is correct, and certain empirical observations are correct, then we must be in a metastable state. i.e. the standard model together with certain empirical observations implies our actual universe is metastable?

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Compositional language for hypotheses about computations
Chris van Merwijk4moΩ110

I may be confused somehow. Feel free to ignore. But:
* At first I thought you meant the input alphabet to be the colors, not the operations.
* Instead, am I correct that "the free operad generated by the input alphabet of the tree automaton" is an operad with just one color, and the "operations" are basically all the labeled trees where labels of the nodes are the elements of the alphabet, such that the number of children of a node is always equal to the arity of that label in the input alphabet?
* That would make sense, as the algebra would then I guess assign the state space of the tree automaton to the single color of the operad, and each arity n operation would be mapped to the mathematical function from Q^n to Q.
* That would make sense I think, but then why do you talk about a "colored" operad in: "we can now define a deterministic automaton over a (colored) operad O to be an O-algebra"?
 

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24Extinction Risks from AI: Invisible to Science?
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17Datapoint: median 10% AI x-risk mentioned on Dutch public TV channel
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29Straw-Steelmanning
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10An AI defense-offense symmetry thesis
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30How are compute assets distributed in the world?
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20What kinds of algorithms do multi-human imitators learn?
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41Are human imitators superhuman models with explicit constraints on capabilities?
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27A paradox of existence
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36Manhattan project for aligned AI
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7Natural Value Learning
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